Develop Reference

Django: form validation errors on form creation

Let's say I have a Django form with ChoiceField:
class MyForm(forms.Form):
name = forms.CharField(label="Name", required=True)
some_object = forms.ChoiceField(label="Object", choices=[(0, '-----')] + [(x.id, x.name) for x in Obj.objects.all()])
Choisefield is being initialized with list of objects headed by 'empty choice'. There is no object with pk=0.
In that form I have a clean() method:
def clean(self):
if not Obj.objects.filter(self.cleaned.data['some_object'].exists():
self.errors.update({'some_object': ['Invalid choice']})
It works well when I'm sending a form to a server, if data in it doesn't match conditions, field.is_valid returns False and I render form with error messages. But, when I create an empty form like this:
if request.method == 'GET':
data = {'name': 'Untitled',
'some_object': 0}
form = MyForm(data)
return render(request, 'app\template.html', {'form': form})
Django renders form with error message ('Invalid choice') even though form was just created and 'Object' select was intended to be set in empty position. Is it possible to disable form clean() method in specific cases? Or maybe I'm doing this all wrong? What is the best practice to create an empty form?

The problem is that a form with any data dictionary passed to it counts as a "bound" form, against which Django will perform data validation. See here for details: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/ref/forms/api/#bound-and-unbound-forms
You want an "unbound" form - to have default initial values in here, just set the initial property on your form fields. See full details here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/ref/forms/fields/#initial

Django - Assign default value to field in ModelForm

In my application I have a CreateView that must initialize some fields of the model with a default value, different from the default defined inside the model.
I do not want the user to edit the value, thus I put the field in the exclude list
class AForm(ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = AModel
exclude = ['a_field']
class AView(CreateView):
form_class = AForm
The question is: where do I set the value of a_field?
I tried to define clean methods inside AForm, like thus
class AForm(ModelForm):
[...]
def clean(self):
d = super(AForm, self).clean()
d['a_field'] = 10
return d
however a_field is set to whatever its default value defined in the model is, rather than 10. I also tried defining clean_a_field, but that is simply not executed.
If I remove a_field from the exclude list, then the clean and clean_a_field will work, but the form won't validate unless I render some <input name="a_field"> inside the template, which is not optimal.

I managed to solve the issue in a way that makes me satisfied, although I'm still not 100% happy with the code.
a_field is a required (by the model) field, thus it is necessary to render an <input name="a_field"> inside the template. The trick was to make a_field non-required:
class AForm(ModelForm):
a_field = Field(required=False,
widget=forms.HiddenInput)
class Meta:
model = AModel
def clean_a_field(self):
return 10
This way I can avoid rendering the field in my template, and the form will still validate. And even if the form is rendered with {{ form.as_p }}, widget=forms.HiddenInput saves my day.

Exclude the field from the form, then in the view you can set the value before you save the form:
form = AForm(request.POST)
if form.is_valid():
new_record = form.save(commit=False)
new_record.a_field = 10
new_record.save()
You also might want to avoid the exclude list and specify which fields you'd like to include with the fields attr of the form definition. See the first paragraph here in the docs.

You set a default value in the model. From the official document,
a_field = models.CharField(max_length=7, default=''), for example

I have a way to Face this situation. Follow the following process:
Remove 'a_field' from the excludes in AForm.
Do not expose 'a_field' in HTML template. i.e. Don't give the user option to change the value via Form in Template. This would ensure that normal user's wont modify the value.
To prevent completely, over-ride get_form_kwargs in the View.
This would provide or over-ride your desired value to 'a_field' and save that
e.g.
class AView(CreateView):
form_class = AForm
def get_form_kwargs(self):
kwargs = super(AView, self).get_form_kwargs()
if self.request.method in {'POST', 'PUT'}:
# Change post data to over-ride or provide value of 'a_field'
data = self.request.POST.copy()
data.update({
'a_field': 'value'
})
kwargs['data'] = data
return kwargs

How can I disable the wtforms SelectField choices validation?

I have a wtforms form
class MyForm(Form):
names = SelectField('name', choices=[])
The choices of names field is built dynamically and rendered in the template by an ajax call. When I submit the form, it raises an exception "not a valid choice". I don't want the form to validate the choices of names field for me. How can I disable the validation?

I did something like this to step around the SelectMultipleField validation in WTForms. It should work the same way with a plain SelectField
class NonValidatingSelectMultipleField(SelectMultipleField):
"""
Attempt to make an open ended select multiple field that can accept dynamic
choices added by the browser.
"""
def pre_validate(self, form):
pass
I simply override the built-in validation.

I was stuck with the same issue. The solution provided by Xealot is great. I found that there is an option to set validation to False using validate_choice=False. I have included an example of both the solutions below.
class NonValidatingSelectField(SelectField):
"""
Attempt to make an open ended select multiple field that can accept dynamic
choices added by the browser.
"""
def pre_validate(self, form):
pass
class MyForm(Form):
names = NonValidatingSelectField('name')
names2 = SelectField('name2', validate_choice=False)

By "I don't want the form to validate the choices", I assume you actually mean "I'm going to do it myself later and doubt the form's ability to do it correctly".
But you are in luck! You can subclass an existing form to add choices dynamically.
class MyForm(Form):
# other fields...
def some_handler(request):
name_choices = build_name_choices()
class RealForm(MyForm):
names = SelectField('name', choices=name_choices)
form = RealForm(request.GET)
form.validate()
This also saves you from the tedium of merging the form's validation and error messages with those you generate yourself later.

Accessing form fields as properties in a django view

According to the Django tutorial, you should access form fields using cleaned_data dictionary. I'm wondering why I can't access the properties of the form directly? My form validates just fine, but when I try to access it, Django complains that the object does not have the attribute. I added some code below that I hope will help diagnose the problem.
Form:
class CustomForm(forms.Form):
description = forms.CharField(widget = forms.TextInput(attrs = {'placeholder' : 'enter some text'}), label = "My form")
View:
def process_form(request):
if request.method != 'POST':
raise Http404
myForm = CustomForm(request.POST)
if not myForm.is_valid():
c = RequestContext(request)
return render_to_response('home/index.html', {'form' : myForm }, c)
# debug
print 'Description: ' + myForm.description # this does NOT work
# print 'Description: ' + myForm.cleaned_data['description'] # this does work
I get the following error: 'CustomForm' object has no attribute 'description'. Did I miss something in the docs that says I can't do that?

If your form is validated then you can access myForm cleaned_data:
print myForm.cleaned_data.get('description')
If you want to see why you cannot access myForm.description then you can see the data dictionary of your myForm:
print myForm.__dict__

The way you define fields using django.forms is just a convenient, declarative syntax; it's not really representative of what the final Form class, or an instance of it, looks like in terms of attributes.
Forms have a metaclass (without getting too deep into it, a metaclass is to declaring a class using the class keyword as an __init__ method is to creating an instance of a class using parentheses -- a hook to customise the object being created, which in the case of a metaclass, is a class!) which picks off Fields from the form class at definition time and adds them to a base_fields dict. When you instantiate a form, its base_fields are deep-copied to a fields attribute on the instance.
One point of confusion might be that you use . to access fields for display in templates -- what's actually happening there is that Django's template engine first attempts to use dictionary-style [] access to resolve property lookups and the base form class defines a __getitem__ method to take advantage of this, looking up the appropriate field from the form instance's fields dict and wrapping it with a BoundField, a wrapper which knows how to use the field and data from the form for displaying the field.

You can access the fields of a Form instance from its fields attribute.
myForm.fields['description']
And some property like label can be accessed like this:
myForm.fields['description'].label
Not sure how to display the value corresponding. Anybody having idea?
here is my reference
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/forms/api/#accessing-the-fields-from-the-form

You can access your field trought dict.
form.__dict__["fields"]["description"]

How do I associate input to a Form with a Model in Django?

In Django, how do I associate a Form with a Model so that data entered into the form are inserted into the database table associated with the Model? How do I save that user input to that database table?
For example:
class PhoneNumber(models.Model):
FirstName = models.CharField(max_length=30)
LastName = models.CharField(max_length=30)
PhoneNumber = models.CharField(max_length=20)
class PhoneNumber(forms.Form):
FirstName = forms.CharField(max_length=30)
LastName = forms.CharField(max_length=30)
PhoneNumber = forms.CharField(max_length=20)
I know there is a class for creating a form from the the model, but even there I'm unclear on how the data actually gets to the database. And I'd like to understand the inner workings before I move on to the time-savers. If there is a simple example of how this works in the docs, I've missed it.
Thanks.
UPDATED:
To be clear -- I do know about the ModelForm tool, I'm trying to figure out how to do this without that -- in part so I can better understand what it's doing in the first place.
ANSWERED:
With the help of the anwers, I arrived at this solution:
Form definition:
class ThisForm(forms.Form)
[various Field assignments]
model = ThisModel()
Code in views to save entered data to database:
if request_method == 'POST':
form = ThisForm(request.POST)
if form.is_valid():
for key, value in form.cleaned_data.items():
setattr(form.model, key, value)
form.model.save(form.model)
After this the data entered in the browser form was in the database table.
Note that the call of the model's save() method required passage of the model itself as an argument. I have no idea why.
CAVEAT: I'm a newbie. This succeeded in getting data from a browser to a database table, but God only knows what I've neglected or missed or outright broken along the way. ModelForm definitely seems like a much cleaner solution.

Back when I first used Forms and Models (without using ModelForm), what I remember doing was checking if the form was valid, which would set your cleaned data, manually moving the data from the form to the model (or whatever other processing you want to do), and then saving the model. As you can tell, this was extremely tedious when your form exactly (or even closely) matches your model. By using the ModelForm (since you said you weren't quite sure how it worked), when you save the ModelForm, it instantiates an object with the form data according to the model spec and then saves that model for you. So all-in-all, the flow of data goes from the HTML form, to the Django Form, to the Django Model, to the DB.
Some actual code for your questions:
To get the browser form data into the form object:
if request.method == 'POST':
form = SomeForm(request.POST)
if form.is_valid():
model.attr = form.cleaned_data['attr']
model.attr2 = form.cleaned_data['attr2']
model.save()
else:
form = SomeForm()
return render_to_response('page.html', {'form': form, })
In the template page you can do things like this with the form:
<form method="POST">
{{ form.as_p }}
<input type="submit"/>
</form>
That's just one example that I pulled from here.

I'm not sure which class do you mean. I know that there were a helper, something like form_for_model (don't really remember the exact name; that was way before 1.0 version was released). Right now I'd it that way:
import myproject.myapp.models as models
class PhoneNumberForm(forms.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = models.PhoneNumber
To see the metaclass magic behind, you'd have to look into the code as there is a lot to explain :]. The constructor of the form can take instance argument. Passing it will make the form operate on an existing record rather than creating a new one. More info here.

I think ModelForm.save documentation should explain it. With its base class (Form) you would need to use the Form.cleaned_data() to get the field values and set them to appropriate Model fields "by hand". ModelForm does all that for you.

The Django documentation is pretty clear on this subject. However, here is a rough guide for you to get started: You can either override the form's save method or implement that functionality in the view.
if form.is_valid() # validation - first the fields, then the form itself is validated
form.save()
inside the form:
def save(self, *args, **kwargs):
foo = Foo()
foo.somefield = self.cleaned_data['somefield']
foo.otherfield = self.cleaned_data['otherfield']
...
return foo.save()